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You Won't Have To Pay To Use The PS4's DVR

You won’t have to pay a fee to stream and record footage on the PS4, SonySony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida confirmed on Twitter yesterday. Anxious fans had begun to ask Yoshida about that, after it became clear the MicrosoftMicrosoftwouldn’t be giving away those services on Xbox One, and he responded definitely. It certainly would have been awkward if the share button on the PS4 controller was only available for an extra fee.

Sony and Microsoft’s subscriber services — Playstation Plus and Xbox Live Gold, respectively — will look awfully similar when the new consoles launch in the fall. Sony will start to charge for online multiplayer, which it didn’t do with the PS3, and Microsoft is now offering free games with a Gold subscription, just like with Playstation Plus. As with most stories in the next-gen, this is about two seemingly different ideas meeting in the middle.

Sony still offers more services for free than Microsoft, the new DVR feature notwithstanding, while Microsoft reserves most online functionality for Gold members. It does offer more partnerships and services once you fork over the fee, but legions of NetflixNetflix-watchers find themselves paying $60 a year for a service they’re already buying from another company.

In the great internet shouting match that typifies the next-gen console war at this moment, this sort of news offers more ammunition for the pro-Sony crowd, albeit not much more. Such news pieces illustrate the massive perception problem that Xbox One has with gamers right now — it can seem like every story in the gaming blogosphere plays into the same general narrative: Sony is out to give you what you want, Microsoft is out to screw you. Gizmodo’s Brian Barret, no fan of Xbox Gold, had some choice words for Microsoft:

“The tyranny of Xbox Live Gold was bad enough when it was limited to making you pay for services you were already paying for. But this is somehow even more insidious. Game DVR, OneGuide, and Skype were all promoted prominently as Xbox One features. It should be a safe assumption that when you buy a product, it will come with the features it’s advertised with.”

Microsoft could stand to loosen its grip on some of the services it’s hiding behind a paywall with the Xbox One. While I’m not sure how much the gaming DVR will ultimately matter (people who are that concerned with the social elements will likely pay for online multiplayer anyway), some of the less game-oriented features would better entice casuals if they didn’t require a subscription. Skype and channel surfing, in particular, are nice features that could draw a wider audience. But those are the particulars. If Microsoft can’t start heading off these small problems before they arise, Sony will keep finding openings and jabbing at them. The more stories like this one circulating, the more Sony cements its lead with gamers.

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